How to Talk so Kids will Listen & Listen so Kids Will Talk
by Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish (Scribner)
You know a parenting book has been around a long time when a child of one of the authors is all grown up, a parent herself and writing the afterword to the newest edition.
There’s a reason that “How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk,” by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, has a permanent spot on family bookshelves next to “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.”
The book, first published in 1980 and now updated for the age of social media, calls on parents to be their best selves. We have all sworn that we will not make the same mistakes that our parents made. That we will never yell at, spank or demean our children in fits of fatigue and frustration. Then the little buggers show up, and we find ourselves trying to maintain some semblance of dignity as we carry them kicking and screaming from the mall.
Kids, in all their irrational, irascible beauty, and parents, in their desperation to do better, are the reason this book exists. If I have a quibble, it’s that Faber and Maz-lish make it all seem too easy. Read the book, do the exercises and watch little Lucifer transform himself into an angel. Sure.
Many of the role-playing conversations and comic strips seem pat. For example, when little Johnny misbehaves in the grocery store, he isn’t “punished” but instead “experiences the consequences” of his actions: Next time Mom goes to the grocery store, he has to stay home. The lesson my kids would have learned from this is that misbehaving gets you out of having to go to the grocery store.
So no, I don’t think “How to Talk” is a magic bullet that can be implemented verbatim with foolproof results. But it does offer useful nuggets — “Lights, kids!” is really all that a left-on switch merits.
Don’t lecture, remind.
And whenever possible, do it in two words.
What parent in her right mind would turn her back on a useful nugget like that?
— Tracy Grant, The Washington Post
The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice
by M.G. Lord. (Walker)
Journalist and cultural critic M.G. Lord admits that “feminism may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the name Elizabeth Taylor.” But after examining how each of Taylor’s movies challenged the status quo for women at the time they were filmed, she makes the case that Taylor was an “Accidental Feminist” (emphasis on accidental).
Taylor impersonated a boy in order to compete as a jockey in the 1944 film “National Velvet,” successfully fought an aunt’s attempt to have her lobotomized in her 1959 role inTennessee Williams’ “Suddenly, Last Summer,” and played a loud, frustrated “handmaiden to educated men” who nonetheless challenged patriarchal society in the 1966 film of the Edward Albee play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
The groundbreaking nature of movies is reflected in Lord’s discussion of the filmmakers’ struggles to get their works past censors: The Production Code Administration aimed to forbid “sympathetic portrayals of ‘sin’ ” and “ridicule of the law.” Taylor became a more overt advocate for social justice later in life, serving as a public face in the fight for AIDS awareness.
— Lisa Bonos, The Washington Post
Conquered Into Liberty: Two Centuries of Battles Along the Great Warpath That Made the American Way of War
by Eliot A. Cohen. (Free Press)
Along a narrow length of North American territory from Albany to Montreal — some 200 miles of dark forest, rapid rivers and cold lakes — French Canadian, Native American, French, British and colonial armies fought each other (in shifting alliances and coalitions) for some 200 years. This area became known as the Great Warpath.
“The … region has retained its fascination for visitors hoping to catch the echoes of drum, trumpet, and war cry … (but) the reverberations are so faint as to be nearly inaudible,” Eliot Cohen writes in his new book, “Conquered Into Liberty.” The combatants fought in a “menacing gloom of primeval woods,” all now displaced by the flotsam of modern tourism.
The author contrasts the landscape of the 17th and 18th centuries with that of its tourist-ridden successor in the early 21st century. Sites and names are only faintly remembered: We learn about Rogers’ Rangers, named after Maj. Robert Rogers, who led reconnaissance companies and irregular troops against French and later British enemies; Fort Ticonderoga, a major redoubt in upstate New York variously occupied by enemy and colonial forces; Benedict Arnold, the most infamous traitor in American History; and Gens. Louis de Montcalm and James Wolfe who fought a climactic battle on the plains of Abraham in Quebec which ended in a resounding British victory in 1759 and the death of both commanders.
“Conquered into Liberty” is beautiful narrative history: The author is a poetic and evocative storyteller. But the book is also valuable for the lessons it imparts. The experience along the Great Warpath has seeped into the American character and helped prepare subsequent warriors to appreciate Washington’s famous declaration, “If you wish for peace prepare for war.”
— Josiah Bunting, The Washington Post
